Re-examining Sacco-Vanzetti

THE OPENING last week of papers relating to the Sacco-Vanzetti case--papers which once belonged to former Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877--may shed new light on the controversy which has swirled around the case since 1927, when the two self-proclaimed anarchists--Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti--were arrested, tried, convicted and executed in connection with a double murder that took place during a bank robbery.

The files apparently contain information which, for instance, may help clarify the adversary relationship which developed between Lowell--a member of Governor Alvan T. Fuller's commission to investigate the case--and then-Law School Dean Felix Frankfurter--a Sacco-Vanzetti suporter.

The Lowell papers, however, will not be available to the University community or the general public for some four to six weeks, while they undergo the laborious process of cataloguing and microfilming. It is hoped that this process can be carried out as quickly as possible, and that all the information contained in the files eventually sees the light of day; perhaps then, one of the most controversial cases in American jurisprudential history will finally be nearer to resolution.